Weaving words and telling tales.

Category Archives: Politics

Until now I have refrained from commenting on the state of American politics. It isn’t because I don’t have a position (I do).

It’s because I’m completely terrified of where it’s going.

The nation managed to elect a wholly inexperienced, morally and multiply financially self-proclaimed billionaire to the highest office in the land, a man who bragged on national television about the enormity of his sexual member and bragged (on a hot mic) about how his fame and fortune lets him do anything that he wants to women, up to “grab[ing] them by the pussy” if the notion struck him. There have been incidents of this happening around the nation now, with the only excuse given that “this is Trump’s America now, we can do that.”

As someone who is equipped at present with the aforementioned anatomy, that’s terrifying.

Further, all of his picks for cabinet positions all are unqualified for the positions he’s put them in—it’s like he’s playing a matching game and the only matching he’s doing is to match the least qualified to the office position. But that’s not even the scariest thing about it. There’s a pattern and until recently, it went unnoticed.

Enter Jeff Sessions, a Dominionist Christian who doesn’t believe in the separation of church and state and wants to bring the church’s system into every decision that is brought down. Suddenly, everything is on the table. The governnent is in the bedrooms again, the operating room, the OB-GYN clinic…and this man is even worse than the usual of this sort because he’s been on the side of racists before, having been caught saying he was ok with the KKK until he found out they smoked weed. I don’t care if he said it as a joke…that isn’t a joke that you make in today’s America, when half of America is looking over its shoulder for someone wanting them dead for the color of their skin or the god they pray to.

The next four years will be truly terrifying for me and other People of Color, gender minorities, the disabled, the infirm—and those like me who lie on the border of all of these axes.

All we can do is raise our voices and march, give this new government the “hell no” it needs to hear while we still can.

The recent influx of these so called bathroom bills is just the latest round of body policing and transantagonism that has been going on since the time of the colonizers. People don’t understand something, so instead of trying to understand it, they seek to violate, dehumanize, or rationalize away their own internal revulsion of it.

It happened before in every culture that embraces nonbinary identities as something to be acknowledged—but, slowly, we remember our heritage as our spirits wake. And it happens now as our sisthren, brethren, and sibthren come into their identities and walk their truths. At the same time, they—we—live lives like the other people, like those people who do so dislike being called what they are—the cisgender.

And it is with the cisgender that I take my current beef.

(Any comments to the effects of “not all cis” are subject to a metric buttload of side-eye. Only warning.)

It should be no one’s business what is in anyone’s trousers/kilt/skirt/long dashiki except their significant other and the owner of the parts, yet a mob of legislators wants to control where people can go to the bathroom or change clothes at the gym based on this. Were we to subject the cisgender populations to this treatment it would be called invasive harassment and overturned so quickly that your head would spin.

But since it’s “for their protection,” this is fine. The double standard is disgusting. It makes me furious. And more than a little sick.

It has also brought back the old chestnut that equates gender to genitalia, and I’m seeing more and more talk about how people would immediately drop a partner—even a long time partner—if their genitals didn’t match the perceived or presenting gender. No other justification is even given, just “I thought you had X” and “bye, Felicia.”

This revelation makes me sick. Just plain sick. And I don’t understand how this line of thinking could be interpreted as anything but transphobic. Putting my cards on the table as nonbinary gets the same reaction. And the reaction is always the same:

“Never mind. Thought you was a woman” and a fast walk away with much dusting of shoulders.

Determining partners on plumbing exclusively is fetishist at best, phobic bull at worst, and needs to stop.

People forget: we are whole persons, with minds and lives and interests and hobbies. Not just sets of genitalia for you to fixate on.

I occasionally jump in on things that my friends on Facebook have weighed in on. Today, a person was lamenting that their now ex-girlfriend has apparently gone on birth control (referred to hereafter as BC) when she apparently wasn’t before. The original poster seemed to be, to put it bluntly, rather butthurt about the whole deal: he bought into the conservative fallacy of being on BC = promiscuity.

In all likelihood, the odds are she was on it in the first place, so I took a devil’s advocate position on the whole thing, explaining that hormonal contraception is used not only for contraception, but also a form of HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) for reproductive issues.

I for one went on birth control around the time right after seeing my now on-again first boyfriend: mostly because it would give me relief from the migraines. (What they don’t tell you about it? YOU GET MOAR BEWBS.) The fact that it gave me free license to jump his bones (didn’t happen, I kept getting cockblocked) was a bonus.

The point is, there’s more than one reason to go on BC. And that decision should be up to the woman in question. NOT a bunch of white-haired old men who think that the body has ways to shut down unwanted pregnancies as in the case of incest and [trigger word redacted]. The fact is, most of the government trying to regulate what we do to our bodies are men—who therefore have a barely-working knowledge of how making babies work in the first place—Todd Akin, anybody?—and don’t seem to bother with science at all. Look at the conservatives’ positions on the subject, and you see a lot of DIVINE VIRTUE and GOD’S WILL and ABOMINATION AGAINST NATURE and AGAINST THE HOLY WORD!

You don’t see…what’s it called—oh, right. SCIENCE. You don’t see the medical experts’ views. You don’t see doctors. You don’t see internists. YOU DON’T SEE WOMEN. Or at least, you don’t see women when you’re not looking inside of Mitt Romney’s infamous binders. Pretty much, the one segment of the population that has anything to do with this whole thing is being silenced. The right to do to our bodies what we want to do, even in cases of improvement of our own health, we’re stuck under the thumb of conservative pols and the damn Church.

And I’m not comfortable with a bunch of old men who won’t let girls join their club trying to tell me what to do with my own huevos internales at every chance they get.

An ancient institution should not be taking the place of a trained medical professional. Church, I don’t turn around and tell you how to massage your prostates. Don’t tell me how to make my ovaries behave, and DON’T go around sticking lighted wands all up in the Promised Land just because you think that a cluster of cells that has not yet even developed a rudimentary nervous system should have sole control over what I do.

That isn’t pro-life. That’s pro-birth. After the birth, where are these people? “Oh, we’re not going to provide assistance to you, you should have known better than to get pregnant in the first place. Oh, and spermicides and condoms and stuff like that is also the devil so no you can’t have it unless you want to go to hell and you don’t want that now do you, silly woman?”

We’re not baby machines. Stop treating us like baby machines. Get out of our laws. For fuck’s sake, start treating women like PEOPLE, you old dustbags. Until then, I’ll just travel about until I can get the medical help I need for my hormonal issue.

I don’t normally reblog things, especially political things, but this warrants it. Just as soon as I’m positive that the country has begun to move in the right direction, something like this happens, and understandably, it causes some serious rage. The question is, will the people of Wisconsin do anything about this?